The Earl of Sandwich is a Glistening God

The Earl of Sandwich is a Glistening God

        "We're in too deep...."
        Jorie Graham's "Prayer"


I met two salmon once
in a motel room near Troy, Nebraska--
glimmering and slippery they were,
as tasty as the finest eels, brown and golden
in a frying pan.

The first lay upside down & backwards, while the other
stood beside the bed--patiently waiting--quick & glittering
from the wetness of my mind, where it had dipped into
and found my secret (as I knelt on the bed in prayer):
I have this great emptiness, deep within me,
        which needs to be filled.
Nothing else matters.

They were not endangered, not by me at least;
I had never killed anything that way
(except perhaps that time I morally
wounded a dwarf mongoose in Rhode Island,
and I gagged once on an albino python in Montreal)
I hold within so many things--
one size fits all, but I am not unquenchable.

Plunging upwards, the upturned salmon swam against the stream
he found the running bitter waters
he found the deepest part, too sweet,
he found the quickening tissues of life's first ocean
and mouthed with his ovule lips the words, words, words
first spoken by The Serpent in The Garden
and felt the knot--a bit off from what he thought--
but truly there.

I felt his thirst unloosened by the in-betweeness
that I shared--I named the two salmon: Far Better
and Four Worse.

Deeper, deeper, into less and less--their minds unfastened
with a quickening gait.
The smooth surfaces of things split, rejoined, and split again
the timeless motions, the quickening, the race, ...
Too deep? he said,
        like the bluebird's beak
lowering the early worm into the open gaping mouth--
like the yawning chick, my blindness was all peripheral
a matter of perspective, the immanent domain of trousers
snaking their way edgewise into the gullet of the opening maw,
like soiled clothes touching the edge of an overstuffed hamper.

Bluish and empurpled veins stand out on the salmon, too
tight skin, as my kisses land on every inch of the seeable
translucent self. Meanwhile, the upturned salmon, bare and bony,
feeds on small puddles of snowmelt, lapping up the miles.
With his endless inwardness, he disperses his sea-like
wetness in the uncoalescing openings.

I turn round to face the upturned salmon
resting my haunches on his tiny pelvis bone
and place the emptiness of my self-same stillness on his swelling brine-filled
forward motion, the tiny upliftings, the rise and falling of things
unseen, undreamt of, like the long red rays of the sun going (up &) down.

The other salmon moves closer, so that soon
in his approach he is not so much near me as in me
Glad to be in? No? So unprotected
from your rubbery glance, so plastic in your
stretched smile. He was
pointing out his full bodylength, like a gull's neck
Love big enough to hide in a breadbox--
all that is true, I carry inside me,
and out and in, this bodywidth of frailty.
My eyes fix on the singular redness of the thing
the unnatural thickening, just there, anticipating
the eruption of the present, the simultaneous emptying,
the undulations, the eager logic, the perplexed engines of desire....

The radio by the bed announced:
"... they were readied by forces she did not recognize ..."

at that last moment we moved, by prearranged signals
so that the one stood at my feet, above the glistening sheets
where my welcoming toes stand out, and the other moves
to my face where my bluest eye begs for his oblation.

        the ending of things
all too certain--a shattering of selves into the rubble
and debris, like ancient Troy a shattering of statues into
unseemly piles of arms, and heads, and legs--the faces
worn away and wedged in between.
We lay there, as Paris, Menelaus & Helen lay--
bodies jumbled up as the shattered stone
our juices spilled for kings.

Even the ear, too, is finally satiated
and the window swallows these words:
"Wait! Did I say salmon? ... I meant salesmen."